Peter John Loewen

Help Me Help You: Conducting Field Experiments with Political Elites

Field experiments can teach important facts about the political world to both political scientists and political elites, whose shared interest in how that world actually works should encourage greater collaboration between the two. Nonetheless, for political scientists, conducting field experiments with elites can seem prohibitively challenging. Drawing on four field experiments with political elites, two in Benin and two in Canada, we outline key lessons on negotiating and conducting field experiments with political elites. Specifically, we outline how ethical concerns can be addressed and overcome. We discuss how the expectations and timelines of campaigns and elites can be managed, particularly when they (appear to conflict) with academic timing and process. Finally, we outline several general concerns about implementation of field experiments and provide some unique solutions.

Neural basis of egalitarian behavior

Individuals are willing to sacrifice their own resources to promote equality in groups. These costly choices promote equality and are associated with behavior that supports cooperation in humans, but little is known about the brain processes involved. We use functional MRI to study egalitarian preferences based on behavior observed in the “random income game.” In this game, subjects decide whether to pay a cost to alter group members’ randomly allocated incomes. We specifically examine whether egalitarian behavior is associated with neural activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the insular cortex, two regions that have been shown to be related to social preferences. Consistent with previous studies, we find significant activation in both regions; however, only the insular cortex activations are significantly associated with measures of revealed and expressed egalitarian preferences elicited outside the scanner. These results are consistent with the notion that brain mechanisms involved in experiencing the emotional states of others underlie egalitarian behavior in humans.

Genes, psychological traits and civic engagement.

Civic engagement is a classic example of a collective action problem: while civic participation improves life in the community as a whole, it is individually costly and thus there is an incentive to free ride on the actions of others. Yet, we observe significant inter-individual variation in the degree to which people are in fact civically engaged. Early accounts reconciling the theoretical prediction with empirical reality focused either on variation in individuals’ material resources or their attitudes, but recent work has turned to genetic differences between individuals. We show an underlying genetic contribution to an index of civic engagement (0.41), as well as for the individual acts of engagement of volunteering for community or public service activities (0.33), regularly contributing to charitable causes (0.28) and voting in elections (0.27). There are closer genetic relationships between donating and the other two activities; volunteering and voting are not genetically correlated. Further, we show that most of the correlation between civic engagement and both positive emotionality and verbal IQ can be attributed to genes that affect both traits. These results enrich our understanding of the way in which genetic variation may influence the wide range of collective action problems that individuals face in modern community life.

For want of a nail: Negative persuasion in a party leadership race

Should party leadership candidates communicate their policy positions to the party’s electorate? And should they do so when their own ideal position is outside their party’s mainstream? This article presents evidence from a field experiment into the communication of controversial policy positions through direct mail. Working with a front-running campaign during the race for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada, we randomly assigned a subset of convention delegates to receive a direct mail treatment featuring policy messages outside the mainstream of the party. Using a survey instrument, we measured the effects of this treatment on delegates’ ratings and preference ordering of leadership candidates. The effects of the direct mail were principally negative; receiving the mail reduced the probability of the candidate being supported.

Nonrepresentative Representatives: An Experimental Study of the Decision Making of Elected Politicians

A considerable body of work in political science is built upon the assumption that politicians are more purposive, strategic decision makers than the citizens who elect them. At the same time, other work suggests that the personality profiles of office seekers and the environment they operate in systematically amplifies certain choice anomalies. These contrasting perspectives persist absent direct evidence on the reasoning characteristics of representatives. We address this gap by administering experimental decision tasks to incumbents in Belgium, Canada, and Israel. We demonstrate that politicians are as or more subject to common choice anomalies when compared to nonpoliticians: they exhibit a stronger tendency to escalate commitment when facing sunk costs, they adhere more to policy choices that are presented as the status-quo, their risk calculus is strongly subject to framing effects, and they exhibit distinct future time discounting preferences. This has obvious implications for our understanding of decision making by elected politicians.

The Impact of News Photos on Support for Military Action

Drawing on two experiments embedded in online surveys, this article examines the impact of news photos on support for military action. In 2011, respondents were asked about support for ongoing military involvement in Afghanistan while being randomly exposed to one of two photos—one of a soldier with a child, the other of a soldier with a gun. The former photo increased expressed support for war; and the effect was greater for those who self-identify as being very interested in international affairs. Three years later, a follow-up experiment was fielded that looked both at the past intervention in Afghanistan and ongoing interventions in Syria; results were very similar. Both experiments speak to the potentially profound role of mass media in generating support (or not) for foreign military engagements, and the increased impact of frames on those who are more attentive to the issue domain.

Generosity and Political Preferences

We test whether generosity is related to political preferences and partisanship in Canada, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States using incentivized dictator games. The total sample consists of more than 5,000 respondents. We document that support for social spending and redistribution is positively correlated with generosity in all four countries. Further, we show that donors are more generous towards co-partisans in all countries, and that this effect is stronger among supporters of left-wing political parties. All results are robust to the inclusion to an extensive set of control variables, including income and education.

Personality and Party Ideology Among Politicians. A Closer Look at Political Elites From Canada and Belgium

We examined the relationship between Big Five personality and the political ideology of elected politicians. To this end, we studied 303 politicians from Flanders, Wallonia, and Canada, relating their self-reported Big Five scores to a partisanship-based measure of political ideology. Our findings show that, in line with the congruency model of personality, Openness to Experience is the best and most consistent correlate of political ideology, with politicians high on Openness to Experience being more likely to be found among the more progressive left-wing political parties.

Media Motivation and Elite Rhetoric in Comparative Perspective

The exchange of diverse points of view in elite deliberation is considered a cornerstone of democracy. This study presents evidence that variations in political motivation for media use predict the tendency of politicians to present deliberative rhetoric that considers multiple points of view regarding issues and sees those views as related to one another. We surveyed 111 incumbent Members of Parliament in Belgium, Canada, and Israel and analyzed a large sample of their parliamentary speeches. The findings demonstrate that motivation to attain media coverage and act upon information from the news media leads politicians to strategically display simple and unidimensional rhetoric due to newsworthiness considerations, but only in countries where the media constitute important resources for reelection. The results contribute to extant literature by demonstrating a media effect on elite deliberation and by emphasizing the moderating role of political systems on the nature of elite rhetoric.

Accountability, Framing Effects, and Risk-Seeking by Elected Representatives: An Experimental Study with American Local Politicians

Risk management underlies almost every aspect of elite politics. However, due to the difficulty of administering assessment tasks to elites, direct evidence on the risk preferences of elected politicians scarcely exists. As a result, we do not know how consistent are politicians’ risk preferences, and under what conditions they can be changed. In this paper, we conduct a survey experiment with 440 incumbent local politicians from across the United States. Using a modified version of the Asian Disease framing experiment, we show that gain/loss frames alter the stated risk preferences of elected officials. We further show that priming democratic accountability increases the tendency to engage in risky behavior, but that this shift in preference only occurs in those politicians who are interested in seeking reelection. These results inform several political science theories that assume stable risk preferences by political elites, or that make no risk assumptions whatsoever. They also provide insights into the role of political ambition and accountability in structuring the behavior of political elites.